


and i thought it was strange, suddenly everything changed

by pinkejessman



Category: Pacific Rim (2013), The LEGO Movie (2014)
Genre: Autistic Character, Multi, Non-binary character, Trans Character, i dont know what else to tag this as? there's giant monsters and giant robots, i will fight you for queerplatonic ben n uni ok, yet another terrible pacific rim au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 09:10:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2807192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkejessman/pseuds/pinkejessman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are rumbles beneath the surface of the sea, but no one knows this. Not yet. There are waves, that’s all. Ripples. The fish are hardly disturbed. The earth splits open in a gaping wound, as blue as a child’s drawing of the ocean. It does not bleed.</p>
<p>Monsters come out of the sea. Heroes come from the land. The heroes love. The monsters destroy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and i thought it was strange, suddenly everything changed

**Author's Note:**

> This is not the fic I was supposed to be working on lmao but here we go anyway. Happy (early) birthday Cosette even tho this is not the fic I promised you.

**one.**

 

There are rumbles beneath the surface of the sea, but no one knows this. Not yet. There are waves, that’s all. Ripples. The fish are hardly disturbed. The earth splits open in a gaping wound, as blue as a child’s drawing of the ocean. It does not bleed.

 

**two.**

 

They call it the Trespasser, and it attacks the Americans. They’re all secretly pleased it could start with them, watching it on TV as it smashes the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s the stuff from nightmares, the source of nightmares in the five days it destroys the California coast. The years after.

 

On an island, far away, on the same ocean, a child stares across the water. A radio plays a narration of the combined military forces: they are attacking with everything they have, and everything they have is not enough.

The child takes a box of crayons from inside her house and draws the monster over and over and over again. Each time she focuses on another detail, rendering the orange throat, the axehead, the sharp ridges of bone, in bright color. She tacks them up on her walls. She is not afraid, not exactly. Something like fear is creeping into her, making her skin sing and her stomach twist up, and she wants to run for an eternity.

Trespasser goes down heavy, but her heart leaps higher into her throat. She can’t explain it just yet.

It’s explained for her six months later when another beast rises bellowing from the sea.

 

Benny Chu has just turned fifteen when this happens, and he’s just drawn up blueprints for a spaceship that has the space programs falling over themselves. He’s a sophomore in college and he has promises of being an astronaut, as soon he can get a degree.

He’s doodling comets in the margins of his notebook when the girl next to him grabs his arm and shakes it, hard. He jerks away but she only shoves her iPad under his nose. She’s crying, he realizes. Her eyes are wide.

He glances down at the newsfeed she’s got pulled open but he can’t understand it: among the flashing RED ALERTs and BREAKING NEWSs, there’s something that looks like Godzilla, but it doesn’t really. Its mouth is hanging open in a roar, but as he watches, confusion beginning to dim, it puts its arm through a building, sending it toppling.

Around the room everyone is watching too, switching from notes to the video on their laptops. The professor abandons her lecture and pulls out her phone instead.

“Oh my god,” someone says. “How the fuck-”

It doesn’t click into place at first but eventually he realizes. This thing, this creature, has come out of water onto the land, and it looks so angry, it’s trampling everything in its path. His jaw falls open. The world is spinning around him. It looks like a movie, like he’s just an actor, but he’s forgotten his lines and no one will yell cut and he can’t even remember auditioning for the role.

He feels small, he thinks, and he wonders if that’s good. Wonders if he’s supposed to feel different.

 

Lucy grits her teeth and stays glued to her laptop for a week straight as the bloggers in San Francisco update the world on the story. She’s more angry than anything, not that she can attach a name to it yet, and she hasn’t attached the name Lucy to herself yet either. She’s numb when she’s not shaking, and it’s just not fair, it’s not fair that people are hurt and dead and it’s not fair that everything is bad and it’s not fair-

Her parents get worried about how upset she is, to the point of sitting her down and telling her it’s all going to be fine, they’re going to be okay, everything’s going to go back to normal. It’s not, of course. She’s smart. She thinks of increasingly horrible situations that might occur, but in the end it’s so simple. It’s all so simple. Monsters, and more.

 

The boy is still chubby-cheeked, sitting with his mom in the attic. The tinker toys they went up for are still spread across the floor, a few of them linked together before his mother answered a phone call from his aunt, balancing her phone between her ear and her shoulder to hand her son the pieces he’s looking for.

“γειά,” she says, relaxed smile dropping from her face as her sister tells her the news, just loud enough that Emmet can hear, just panicked enough that he can’t understand her. He watches his mom clasp a hand over her mouth and knit her brow together. He connects four sticks to make a square.

His mom closes her eyes.

Eight more sticks make a cube.

She pulls the boy closer to he and he doesn’t struggle against her. “μαμά?”

“μωράκι μου,” she whispers, stroking a hand over his hair.

“μαμά?”

He doesn’t find out for hours later, when his mom turns on the news as they eat dinner. She cries, just a little, and he just sucks his thumb a little. Not too much, because he’s not a scared baby, he’s eight and that’s old and he doesn’t get scared and suck his thumb.

He sleeps in his mom’s bed that night though, because if the monsters come, he wants to be safe.

 

The twins look at each other and say nothing; they live in each others’ heads so well. The Pacific Ocean is a long way away, Liam thinks. The world is too small for anything to be far enough, Danny thinks. The world isn’t doing that great, they think. They have the whole conversation in their heads, arms pressed together, facing the same direction. The twins have always been like this, their mam would tell people. They were like the same person, Danny liked to say. They were like half of one person, Liam thought.

So it was them. Of course it was them.

 

**three.**

 

The things are called the kaiju. There’s a name for them because they aren’t an isolated incident, because it wasn’t just Trespasser, but there are more coming out of the ocean. There’s hit on top of hit, and it takes more and more ammo to bring them down. No one can handle it, not anymore, and it all comes to a peak when the largest kaiju yet takes down over three hundred people in one step, in Australia. The program is put into place as a last hope, when everyone realizes that it’s not just going to stop one day.

The program is called the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps, headed by a man named Vitruvius, who didn’t really care when anyone pointed out that there was no proof the kaiju couldn’t come out of any other ocean. He had his job, and he was going to do it. Most of his job seemed to be organizing which military got to shoot things where. He’s watching them do it one day, from inside his safe office on remote cameras, mounted on the tanks, when he thinks, oh. Yeah, robots would do the trick.

Ben is always quick to point out that the robots aren’t technically robots. The term is jaeger, he tells Vitruvius, over and over, and they’re piloted internally. In theory, at least; Benny has the paperwork all drawn up, but he hasn’t slept in three days by the time the blueprints are finalized, and he’s not actually sure if there’s any science in them. He’s been working with the PPDC nonstop since the second kaiju came out of the water and it shows. He twitches, he stutters, he can’t remember words, worse than usual. He’s exhausted by the time he unfurls the papers in front of the pirate, slumping down over the table.

“Hmm,” the pirate says, smoothing the notes out with his hand. “How big were you picturin’ these?”

“Big,” Benny mumbles. “Person goes in the head, see, neurons connect and- stuff.”

“I see.”

The pirate examines the plans from a different angle. “I like it,” he says. “It’s good. I can build it if ya want.”

 

The pirate has a real name but Benny doesn’t know it. Even though he knows how important names are, all he really knows about the pirate is that he was the person who came to Benny's house and found him in his childhood bedroom, after he abruptly dropped all his classes and also sort of dropped off the face of the world. There’s no space anymore. Everything there is, it’s contained within the atmosphere. Not contained under the sea, though, and that’s the problem. The pirate dude the PPDC sends has to explain things a few times to him, but Benny eventually packs his bag and hugs his mom, and then they go to an old military base and help absolutely no one for months. When the third kaiju rears its ugly head Benny is just finalizing his plans and backing them with frantic research.

The pirate wants to start by building the shell of the robot first, but without the sheer amount of metal needed, they end up taking apart a lie detector and a CAT scanner and hooking it up to Benny's head. They film the whole thing, so it counts as science, and so Benny can throw up a _second_ time, by watching the recording. His eyes go bloodshot, and he falls off his chair, just a few seconds after the computer lights up green. Two seconds of stable connection and he’s heaving on the floor of an old weapons storage facility. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work.

 

Vitruvius finds a crew working among the rubble of a smashed city. A leader who’s renamed himself Business, and he sneers at everything broken he sees, but more importantly a pair of Irish twins. The two of them are like shadows to each other, and they’re good men. They don’t even have to look at each other to sort through the garbage or patch up the children or cook for the survivors, but they move seamlessly, wonderfully.

And Vitruvius things, oh. Yeah, that makes sense.

 

Danny and Liam each grip their own knees as the pons system is carefully lowered into place. The kid doing it looks way too young, Liam thinks. Who isn’t, these days, Danny thinks, and it doesn’t register to them that they’re established a link. They’re always been like this, they have to explain later. Their memories are the same. It’s not a perfect situation, because of the memory thing, but they have a solid connection for close to ten minutes, and they come out of it the same as they went in, no tremors or bleeding noses. When they come out of the drift they sit quietly for a moment, breathing in sync.

The twins become the first official jaeger pilots. The world scoffs, but they’re running out of options.

 

**four.**

 

Benny won’t let the twins go out until they’ve got a backup jaeger, just in case. No one mentions what “just in case” is, but they all know. Just in case they end up with their brains fried by the tech. Just in case the whole thing ends up at the bottom of the ocean, destroyed by kaiju power and fury. But as soon as there’s a spare safely stored away in an airplane hanger, Danny and Liam are suited up, strapped in, and sent out into open water. It’s quite possibly the most reckless thing the PPDC has ever done, and they've only got one chance. The three of them huddle before the screens, watching in real time how the twins move as one and drive the kaiju back from the land.

It’s sloppy work, honestly; there’s no real fighting technique and it’s taking them too long to figure out how to draw and use their weapons, but the kaiju scratches at the metal chest plates and doesn’t leave a mark. In the end, tanks take it down, but there’s progress, and only 10% of usual damage to the land, and they celebrate for a night. Quietly, because Danny and Liam are exhausted and clinging to each other, eyes half open, and oh that’s interesting, Benny needs to take notes on that right away, but no. He goes to bed and sleeps a solid fourteen hours and when he wakes up everything is still the same. They’ve made a difference, if only a little one.

 

It’s not long before the media picks up on them. There’s not much going on in the news anymore, for obvious reasons. Celebrities are much less interesting when it seems like the end of the world is coming around, and everything else just seems to stop. So the jaegers are relevant, and of interest, and all of them find themselves giving vague interviews to reporters that call them the hope of the future.

 

The twins drop off the shores of Australia.

 

Just off the coast of Mexico.

 

Halfway between Hawaii and North America.

 

The twins drop heavy into their own beds and remind themselves a million times where they are. We’re safe, Danny thinks. We’re together, Liam thinks. They can each feel when the other person is breaking, so they fix each other. Sometimes they can’t remember which person they are.

 

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Benny asks, hooking the pons over the pirate’s face. He checks it over twice before taking the other and carefully settling it onto Vitruvius. Both men look determined, and Benny's not really in a position to argue, but he wants to check one more time before flipping the switch.

“Does it matter?” Vitruvius says, and yeah. That’s the real question here.

Benny flips the switch and jumps back.

At first nothing really happens. They both look strained, and tense, and their eyes are wide, but they both look okay, and then the pirate’s head starts jerking rapidly. Vitruvius is taking shallow breaths, and the connection is jumping all over the place. Full connection down to fragile and back up to somewhat steady and down again, until they stabilize and go still.

Slowly, they open their eyes.

“That went about as well as could be expected,” the pirate reasons, and pulls himself out of his chair to wobble over to the screens. He leans on the panel and looks down at the readings. “Pretty well, wouldn’t you say?”

So Vitruvius and the pirate become the second drift team, and Benny starts more plans. A jaeger with blasters on the arms, and one with blades for hands. One that’s light on its feet to get out of the way, and one with a low center of gravity, so hold its ground and fight. He can’t build them all but he tries.

 

They start winning. The kaiju start going down long before they can do any damage, and the cities are rebuilding, and they’re winning. The PPDC is the world’s leading defense, so they get grants from every major government and build more jaegers, hire more tech people, and start the academy. People are not having nightmares anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> the greek that emmet and his mom speak translates to "γειά - hey, μαμά -mama, μωράκι μου - my little baby", if google translate can be believed. my tumblr is autisticbennychu.tumblr.com if you want to watch me cry about legos and cartoons?


End file.
